


Amazing Grace, Part One

by itstonedme



Series: Amazing Grace [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-08-03
Updated: 2009-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-14 22:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itstonedme/pseuds/itstonedme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Depression-era Southeastern U.S.  A migrant comes upon a teenage boy and his father living in rural Tennessee.  This is a quiet story that moves at its own pace.  What follows is less about sexual adventure than about two young men who once met and how their lives changed as a result.  </p>
<p>Originally posted on LJ in August 2009 <a href="http://itstonedme.livejournal.com/22853.html#cutid1">here</a> with reader comments.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: A work of fiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Amazing Grace, Part One

_August 1933_

The day had dawned hot. By the time the sun had climbed to mid-morning, even the birdsong had been burned from the air. The only noise carrying through the rolling tree-lined fields was the constant rasp of a hundred heat bugs and the drone of a thousand flies. 

Orlando hitched up his bedroll, a half-empty silver flask clinking against the buckle of a belt that held together a blanket and the few pieces of clothing that he owned. He’d started out at sunrise from the shelter of a chicken coop a half county over and since then, he had put a dozen miles, give or take, behind him. It has been no small mercy that the coop had been abandoned, as had the decrepit hut beside it. His sleep had been less fitful with a roof above him however spare, and the lingering reminder of his boarding’s one-time tenants was not so fetid, now that they and the folk who had tended them were long gone. As for breakfast, the carefully rationed scraps collected over the past few days had been sufficient. 

Thus it was that Orlando had felt good as the day started and his trek begun. He owned little, but he owned his freedom. 

The crunch of gravel beneath his boots muted the laboring noise of an approaching vehicle until it was less than a few hundred feet behind him. He crossed to the safe side of the road without breaking stride or looking back and stuck out his right arm. 

*

"Damn migrants," the truck’s driver said as the drifter crossed the road ahead of him. 

Beside him sat his son. He was a quiet young man not long past the awkwardness of youth, small in stature, serious in manner and weak-eyed. He’d spent the ride from town trying to sort out how the world now looked from behind spectacles unexpectedly given to him by the shop keeper that very morning. "Someone dropped them off," the shop keeper had said by way of gentle explanation when Elijah had arrived to pick up a few dry goods for himself and his pa, "and you look like you could use a new pair." The store owner hadn’t seen the need to explain that they had belonged to a fellow in his twenties taken in a harvesting accident near the town where his brother was the undertaker. Elijah’s smile had been shy but instant, and he’d ducked his head and nodded his thanks.

When Elijah’s father had come into the store, though, he’d been plenty annoyed. "We don’t take handouts," he growled to his son, pride and poverty mixing uneasily. "Pa, I can’t see to shoot the pigeons no more," Elijah had rebutted, which had ended the discussion.

While the new glasses might make the road arch and the trees bend, they also sharpened what had become indistinct, and it was this new discovery that now caused Elijah to keenly observe the stranger up ahead raising his arm for a lift. Elijah noticed the sun spinning color in the man’s dark hair, the pattern of sweat stains on his once-white shirt, the loose unlabored roll of motion in his lean frame. 

But most of all, with aching sharpness, Elijah saw the free and daring indifference the lone walker possessed, out in the middle of nowhere, on a pitted rural roadway leading to nowhere. It made his heart beat wistfully. 

He hadn’t needed the new spectacles to feel that. 

The truck motored on, kicking up fumes and dirt. Elijah watched closely until they’d pulled abreast of the walker, then looked back to the arching roadway as they rumbled past.

"Flies are bad, pa," he said quietly, but his father’s foot stayed steady on the gas pedal. 

Elijah looked back through the dust-smeared rear cab window. "Maybe we should show some charity," he ventured, perhaps made brave by his own good fortune that morning. 

Quick as lightning, a hand flew out, striking Elijah's ear. "Don’t be preaching to me, boy," his father warned. But despite the shame that the gift of the glasses had brought, the old man’s better angel led him to ease up on the gas, and the truck hiccupped to a standing idle, oil clouds sputtering out the tailpipe.

Orlando hadn’t counted on the truck eventually stopping, and it took him a moment before he glanced up and quickened his step. As he neared the truck’s flatbed, a rheumy-eyed blue tick raised its head, sniffing the air. Orlando stopped at the driver’s open window. 

"Might I get a ride, sir?" he asked.

Turning towards the young man, the old man’s eyes narrowed at the strange accent. "I didn’t stop to talk about the weather," he finally said. "How far you going?"

"As far as you’ll take me." Orlando’s eyes slid across to the bespectacled young man with enormous blue eyes and ragged home-cut hair staring back at him. He dipped his head in acknowledgment, smiling wide. 

Inhaling sharply, Elijah turned away as if stung by the unbridled openness of the greeting. A flush spread up his neck and into his cheeks, and he blinked several times. 

"Then git in back," the old man said.

Orlando flung his pack over the wooden rails of the flatbed and hoisted himself up. Disturbed from the warm enjoyment of its nest, the dog made a half-hearted effort to rearrange its arthritic bones before collapsing in a sonorous heap atop a rumpled tarpaulin. It held its gaze askance and settled into an uneasy acceptance of the new arrival. The truck ground through first gear and moved on. 

Orlando reached inside his shirt and pulled out a balled up handkerchief. Loosening the knot, he folded back the edges on the remains of a slice of four-day-old bread before breaking off a crust. He tossed it between the dog’s paws where it was considered it for a moment before being tentatively taken. Orlando tore a piece for himself, then tucked the kerchief away. 

Inside the cab, the father broke the silence. "He’s got manners, I’ll give him that. Funny way o’ talkin’, though."

"I think he might be from Ireland or England or some place like that," Elijah replied. 

"How the hell would you know?" the old man said, although inwardly, it was not without pleasure at his son’s better book-learning than his own. "Might be," he considered. 

Praise, however muted, had become a rare thing. Elijah looked out the open window at the bending fields and trees, and smiled. 

*

It took another twenty miles or so before the truck turned onto a short drive leading to a property. Hidden in the trees stood a small single-storey building, with parts that appeared to have been added as circumstances and lumber had afforded. A few bushes ran to weed between earth and walls, and a step-up narrow porch spanned the front, a pair of straight-backed chairs and a crate arranged between them for anyone who happened by. To the right of the house was a large shed, on the other side a small, simple barn with a penned enclosure to house whatever animals were being raised here. Orlando supposed there was a garden plot somewhere, probably further back where the trees gave way to a clearing. The requisite broken down vehicles, many from a time gone by, were rusting about the yard.

The dog preceded him out the back after the truck had come to a stop. 

"May I use your pump to top up my water?" Orlando asked the father once he’d jumped to the ground. Elijah came around to pull the box of dry goods over the side rails, eyes carefully averted.

"Help yourself," the old man said, pointing towards the pump in the side yard and turning towards the house. Elijah made to follow, then stopped, glancing back at Orlando. 

"Sir," Orlando called out. The old man stopped, angling his head. "I’ll work for something to eat, anything you might need done." 

"Elijah, git in the house," his father told him. Waiting for the sound of the screen door, he turned to Orlando. "I figured there’d be more to it than just giving you a ride." 

Orlando hadn’t crossed an ocean and found his way into the American south without knowing that the best way to avoid something that smelled rank was to step around it. "My apology," he said. "I didn’t mean to seem ungrateful. The ride was much appreciated." He turned to leave. 

"You can git yer water," the old man said and watched as Orlando hesitated, then walked to the pump, working it until a trickle built into a more even stream. Filling the flask twice, once after drinking it empty, he twisted the cap tight and shouldered his bedroll, nodding his thanks and crossing back towards the road.

"Where you headed anyways?" the old man called when Orlando was twenty paces gone.

Orlando turned, walking backwards. "California."

The old man looked up at the sky, grinning broadly. "California!" he hooted and shook his head. "You got a long ways to go, son."

Smiling, Orlando nodded and turned back towards the road.

"Wait up now," the old man called out. Drawing a deep breath, he said, "We ain’t got much here. But if you can dig me a new shithouse, we might be able to find you a meal."

Orlando turned and laughed. "Show me the shovel, then."

 

Elijah stood just inside the screen door, out of sight and motionless. Blood thundered in his ears; his breaths drew deep and rapid. Thoughts of being able to talk with someone new, someone not much older than himself, from far away and traveling farther still, filled him with such fear and excitement and confusion that his guts had become watery and his legs weak. 

Then he closed his eyes and told himself that the dark-haired young man was nothing, just a stranger, that he'd be gone by nightfall, and that wanting and getting didn't mean shit in the world he inhabited. He carried the box of supplies to the table and began putting them away.

*

"This here’s my boy Elijah," the father said after coming back out of the house. "He’ll get you set up." He turned towards the barn, leaving the two young men in awkward silence.

"Name’s Orli," Orlando said, extending a hand. 

Elijah looked at it a moment before shaking. "Elijah."

"Got that, mate," Orlando smiled. 

Elijah frowned, not understanding.

"Just you and your dad, then?" 

Elijah nodded and stepped back in the direction of the shed. "Tools are this way." 

"Right." 

Orlando followed and then waited while Elijah opened the shed door, studying the shy and serious young man. He was skinny, no doubt about it, but there was a wiry agility to him that was apparent even as he stopped the door with a cement block before disappearing into the darkness within. Elijah passed out a shovel, a pick, a pair of gloves and a waxed cloth bag of powdered lime, a cloud of chalky dust swirling up as Orlando put it down next to the open door.

"This way," Elijah said, shutting up the shed and picking up the lime bag. He led the way down a path that passed by the clearing Orlando had seen earlier, and Orlando discovered he had been right - a modest but well-cultivated garden was flourishing in the sunlight. "That’s a healthy vegetable patch you have there," he said.

"The critters think so," Elijah replied over his shoulder, then felt the need to correct himself. "The forest critters. Rabbits and such."

Presently, they came upon the outhouse, and Elijah pointed to a spot about ten feet further along the path, still in the shade. "Pa wants the new outhouse put there. Once you’ve got the hole dug, I can give you a hand moving the old one over."

Orlando walked a circuit around the existing outhouse, checking the depth of the back excavation, sizing up what they had with what they wanted. He checked it out inside, then exited, walking back to where Elijah marked the new site back off the path about six feet. The soil was hard packed, and the digging was going to be slow going. "All right," Orlando said. "You’ll be wanting the old one turned and buried, I suppose."

Elijah squinted at him, the sun through the trees catching his eyes and revealing strata of blue that Orlando found fascinating. "If you don’t mind me saying, I’m really glad you come along when you did," Elijah told him. "I wasn’t much looking forward to this."

Orlando picked up the shovel and laughed. "I'd say, then, it's your lucky day."


End file.
